THEY SAY THAT VITAMIN C
CAN INCREASE THE RISK OF CANCER
Oh
yes? And who’s ‘they’?
Steven Ransom
“VITAMIN C CANCER FEAR. High doses of Vitamin C could
increase the risk of cancer, scientists warn today….”
So begins the 15th June 2001 UK Daily Mail front-page
report, outlining the work of Dr Ian Blair, resident researcher at the
University of Pennsylvania Pharmacology Unit. The Mail headline appears
to be in direct conflict with Dr Blair’s own statement: “Absolutely, for
God's sake, don't say Vitamin C causes cancer.” (Yahoo News, Thursday June
14th, 2001) But of course, The Mail and others have
shamelessly done exactly that. To the less discerning reader, the story raises
worrisome questions as to the wisdom of high-level Vitamin C supplementation.
If these worldwide headlines have served any useful purpose at all, it has been
to confirm the moral/intellectual void currently reigning in today’s mass media
‘news’ departments.
At a more fundamental level, why is Dr Blair conducting
tests on the efficacy of Vitamin C at all? We are about to discover that
certain parties have a very definite interest in casting aspersions upon
Vitamin C. Yet again, we are being taught what to think about a certain
subject, but not how. To our knowledge, the information you are about to read
has not been included in any of the latest, and now worldwide ‘Vitamin C
Cancer Scare’ headlines generated by Dr Blair’s findings.
A GOLDEN RULE
Dr Blair postulates that high consumption of Vitamin C (a
most beneficial adjunct in non-toxic cancer recovery treatment) might actually
cause human tissue degeneration, which in turn could lead to a heightened risk
of contracting cancer. And it is here that we arrive at our first golden rule:
when it comes to assessing the veracity of any scientific claim, we must
always read between the lines – we must search for what the report does
not say. We must especially be on the look-out for that hoary old chestnut,
otherwise known as vested interests. A University of Manchester research
methodology handbook contains the following valuable advice:
“Science and research must be studied in the context of
all the interested parties involved. The questions centre on determining the
relative weight of the various allies in the ‘fact-creating’ process - e.g.
funding bodies, businesses, departments of state, professions and other
scientists. In analysing scientific debates, one should always ask what social,
institutional, political and philosophical interests lie behind often
apparently ‘neutral’ and ‘technical’ knowledge claims.” (University
of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology (UMIST) research
methodology course handout, 1994) (emphasis mine)
On the
matter of the ‘fact creation’ process, renowned author John Le Carre recently
stated:
"Big Pharma [the industry in general] is
engaged in the deliberate seduction of the medical profession, country by
country, worldwide. It is spending a fortune on influencing, hiring and
purchasing academic judgment to a point where, in a few years' time, if Big
Pharma continues unchecked on its present happy path, unbought medical opinion will be hard to find." (The
Nation, New York, Interview with John Le Carre, 9th April 2001)
BOUGHT?
With the above in mind, lets put Dr Blair’s University of
Pennsylvania under the spotlight and see what encouragement Dr Blair might have
had in taking his extraordinary position and apparently misquoted position
against Vitamin C. We must ask the following questions: what Big Pharma
influences might there be supporting the University of Pennsylvania Cancer
Center (UPCC) and its mother ship, the University of Pennsylvania Health
Service? What is the relative weight of the funding bodies? If industry
sponsorship is taking place, are UPHS personnel free to exercise unbiased
critical thinking? Or are there grounds to suspect that UPHS been ‘bought’ -
that somewhere along the line, vested interests have ‘purchased academic judgment’?
Before tackling the Vitamin C issue itself, the following
UPHS general statistics are very revealing.
CERTAIN ALLIANCES
In May 2000, Dr Ian Blair’s employers at UPCC received a
$26 million, five year Core Grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) -
the largest and most influential conventional cancer treatment institution in
the world. In fact, UPCC has been continuously funded by the NCI Core Grant
mechanism since the grant was created by the National Cancer Act in the early
1970’s. Currently, UPCC is awash with more than $100 million in cancer research
funding: $37 million is from the National Cancer Institute; $43 million from
closely affiliated organisations, such as the National Institutes of Health,
the organisation which actually funded Dr Blair’s Vitamin C research; another
$12 million from foundational support such as the American Cancer Society and
the Leukaemia Society; and between $8 and $10 million from various
pharmaceutical companies. Earlier, in June of 1999, UPCC received a $4.5
million gift from the William H. Gates Foundation to research conventional
treatments for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Aside from the Bill and Melinda Gates connection, OncoLink,
the University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center,[1][28]
is sponsored very generously by the following corporations: Amgen, the world's
largest independent biotechnology company; Aventis, Ortho Biotech, Inc.,
Varian, Inc., Janssen Pharmaceutica, AstraZeneca, Pharmacia Upjohn and Pfizer.
These corporations are very big indeed, and their names represent no mean
sponsorship committee.
MORE ALLIANCES
In March 2001, UPHS announced a strategic alliance with
Siemens Medical Systems, Inc. Under the terms of the purchasing agreement, UPHS
will make an initial discounted purchase of cardiology, radiology and radiation
oncology equipment from Siemens, who will also service and maintain the
biomedical equipment already in place at designated UPHS sites over the life of
the agreement. In the year 2000, Siemens Medical Solutions, based in Iselin,
New Jersey, reported new orders of $5.65 billion, sales of $5.44 billion and
employs 27,000 worldwide. "This is the kind of alliance that will be
critical in our continuing financial recovery and to assure our position as a
leading national health system," said Robert D. Martin, Ph.D., Chief
Executive Officer of UPHS.
A good relationship with Siemens may well be critical to
UPHS’ financial recovery, but does this kind of dependent alliance foster the
aforementioned necessary climate for critical thinking? What if there are
privately held UPHS reservations over the Siemens equipment, methodology or
ethos? Who will break rank first? Will anyone? What kind of commercially gagged
framework are the UPHS staff now locked into with Siemens?
YET MORE CORPORATE ALLIANCES
On April 26, 2001, UPCC announced a business partnership
with Integral PET Associates, the nation's leading operator of fixed-site
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) cancer scanners. A patient receiving a PET
scan today is injected with a radiopharmaceutical, such as flurodeoxyglucose
(FDG), about 45 minutes before the scan, which takes about two hours. The
radiopharmaceutical tracer emits signals which are then picked up by the PET
scanner. A computer reassembles the signals into recognisable images to
determine if a cancer has spread, if a particular treatment is effective, or if
a patient is disease-free. IPA will now be seeking to supply major hospitals
throughout Pennsylvania with this very expensive equipment. Installing and operating
a PET scanner typically costs around $1,600,000 in up-front capital costs, plus
an additional $800,000 in yearly staff and operational costs.
A short visit to the UPHS website at www.med.upenn.edu will not only confirm
all of the above information, but will also confirm that these alliances
represent only a small percentage of the long-standing conventional
‘friendships’ UPHS has fostered with Big Pharma over the years. Given the
strictly conventional source of sponsorship monies received at UPHS, what
chance will the following statements have of being ‘allowed’ to feature on the
UPHS cancer information page?
“If I contracted cancer, I would never go to a standard
cancer treatment centre. Cancer victims who live far from such centres have a
chance.” Professor Charles Mathe, French cancer specialist
“...as a chemist trained to interpret data, it is
incomprehensible to me that physicians can ignore the clear evidence that
chemotherapy does much, much more harm than good." - Alan C Nixon, PhD,
former president of the American Chemical Society
“Doctors are too
busy to dig into the statistics of cancer treatments, they assume that what
they are taught at school or what is demonstrated in the pages of briefing
journals is the best treatment. They cannot afford to suspect that these
treatments are only the best for the pharmaceutical companies that influence
their ‘institutions of higher learning’.”
Paul Winter, The Cancell Home Page.
“To the cancer establishment,
a cancer patient is a profit center.
The actual clinical and scientific evidence does not support the claims
of the cancer industry. Conventional
cancer treatments are in place as the law of the land because they pay,
not heal, the best. Decades of the
politics-of-cancer-as-usual have kept you from knowing this, and will continue
to do so unless you wake up to this reality.”
- Lee Cowden MD
“Almost every
patient treated with IL2 (a current conventional cancer treatment) suffered
fever, malaise, nausea or vomiting, diarrhoea, sharp drops in blood pressure,
skin rashes, breathing difficulties, liver abnormalities and irregularities in
blood chemistry. Rosenberg himself details a number of horrifying case
histories, and one in particular where the administration of IL2 had
precipitated amongst other things, vomiting, swollen joints, lung fluid and
‘vascular leak syndrome’ where blood would ooze through the vessel walls and
collect under the skin.” Steven
Rosenberg, The Transformed Cell, 1992. (IL2
is still used today.)
“Dr Linus Pauling, often known as the ‘Father of Vitamin C’
and twice awarded the Nobel Prize, declared that large intakes of up to 10g of
the vitamin each day aids anti-cancer activity within the body. Pauling was
largely derided for making these declarations, but today, large doses of
Vitamin C are used by many practitioners for cancer patients in nutritional
therapy, who believe Pauling was right and that the popular nutrient is
indispensable to the body in its fight to regain health from cancer.” Phillip
Day, Cancer, Why We’re Still Dying to Know The Truth, Credence Publications,
2001.
“Do not let either the medical authorities or the
politicians mislead you. Find out what the facts are, and make your own
decisions about how to live a happy life and how to work for a better world.” Linus
Pauling http://www.cforyourself.com
The above remarks are representative of a vast library of
well-sourced contrary information which sensibly questions the validity and
efficacy of conventional cancer treatments based on a huge amount of clinical
research and data. Naturally, with all these expensive and patented treatments
available to fight cancer, the cancer rates should be going down. They are not.
They are increasing.
STAGGERING AMOUNTS
UPHS is totally locked into the conventional cancer
framework - a framework which today, rightly stands accused of achieving no
measurable success at all in its approach to the treatment of cancer, immense
success in causing widespread, unnecessary death through its application of
lethal and highly toxic pharma-radiation treatments, and even greater success
in rewarding itself absolutely staggering amounts of money in the whole grisly
process. That these cancer corporations have become incredibly wealthy through
their ‘chemo ’til we drop’ approach is a fact which Messrs Siemens, Zeneca,
Upjohn, Glaxo, Rhone Poulenc cannot deny.
COMMON SENSE
Pauling was right. We have been seriously misled. Taking
the Siemens $multi-million technology as an example, it may well detect certain
forms of cancer, but upon detecting it, what then happens? Quite simply, a
bewildered, obedient, grateful and unsuspecting cancer sufferer is immediately
directed towards the door marked ‘iatrogenic (doctor-induced) illness and
probable death.’ Closer examination of today's orthodox cancer treatments
clearly reveals that the conventional path is fraught with toxic danger. But
the CEO of UPHS has made it quite clear that ‘the Siemens alliance
[one of so many] is critical to the financial security of UPHS’.
This is why we will hear no publicly dissenting voices from
UPHS as to the horrific realities associated with 20th and 21st
Century conventional cancer treatments. The corporate big boys’ riches must
continue to flow…. and a handsome
proportion of it into the coffers of the very dependent UPHS, of course,
‘to assist in their financial recovery’.
SO WHY THE SLUR ON VITAMIN C?
As has already been stated, conventional cancer treatment
represents a $multi-billion a year industry. These vast profits are fiercely
protected by the industry giants. But their treatments in no way address the
underlying causes of cancer. Cancer is a nutritional/toxic/environmental
condition, which, in a great number of instances, can be successfully reversed
through the application of a sound nutritional approach and common-sense
lifestyle changes. Linus Pauling, dubbed the father of Vitamin C, sensibly
promoted the benefits of consuming high doses Vitamin C in the prevention of
and battle against cancer.
HALF-TRUTHS AND LIES
So why aren’t we hearing about these natural treatment
successes? Why aren’t they being heralded across the world? The answer is
money. Despite the multitudinous successes in cancer regression through
nutrition, and through extensive application of vital elements such as Vitamin
C, Vitamin B17, pancreatic enzymes and other co-factors, Big Pharma is doing
all it can to silence these success stories. To have it become widely known
that cancer can be successfully treated without toxic and profitable
pharmaceuticals would be catastrophic for its business. Who would continue to
purchase these products? What would the Siemens, Glaxo and Upjohn shareholders have to say about that?
To their shame, vested interests are keeping well-proven, non-toxic cancer
treatments from the public domain. This is why, under ‘cancer treatments’ the
UPHS website says this of vitamin B17: http://cancer.med.upenn.edu/pdq_html/6/engl/600093.html
“Several patients displayed symptoms of cyanide
poisoning, including muscle weakness and impaired reflexes, or had
life-threatening levels of cyanide in their blood. (Laetrile can release
cyanide, which is a highly toxic chemical.) The researchers concluded that
Laetrile is not effective as a cancer treatment and is harmful in some cases.”
But now read this contrary extract from a radio talk show,
featured in Phillip Day’s Cancer, Why We Are Still Dying To Know The Truth:
Radio host Laurie Lee: “So this is verified, that laetrile [B17] can have this positive
effect?”
Dr Ralph Moss:
“We were finding this and yet, we in Public Affairs were told to issue
statements to the exact opposite of what we were finding scientifically.”
At the time, Ralph Moss was former Assistant Director of
Public Relations at Memorial Sloan Kettering, NY, a leading American
conventional cancer research facility.
Of course Laetrile, or Vitamin B17, is not approved by the
FDA, but not because it isn’t beneficial – it is, as the links provided at the
bottom of this report will demonstrate. No, Vitamin B17 has not been approved
by the FDA simply because the FDA have been leaned on. That’s the way it goes
in the self-preserving, self-serving, conventional cancer business. To put it
bluntly, biddable FDA officials are only a phone call and a golfing lunch away
from the NCI and the NIH. A classic example of these conflicts of interests and
double standards can be appreciated when one learns that sodium fluoride is
also not approved by the FDA due to its toxicity, and yet drug giant Proctor
and Gamble and others can market the stuff in their toothpastes with complete
impunity.
The UPHS statement on Laetrile is a fabrication. Such is
the wealth of evidence overturning the conventional stance on Laetrile and
Vitamin C, that one can only assume the UPHS statement falls into the following
category:
FALSE SCIENTIFIC
RESEARCH ‘ENDANGERING THE PUBLIC’, Independent News, 13.12. 2000 Doctors are fabricating research results
to win grants and advance their careers, but the medical establishment is
failing to protect the public from the menace of these scientific frauds, a
committee of medical editors said yesterday. Eighty cases of fraudulent
research have been detected in the past four years, and 30 have been
investigated in the past year. In some cases, institutions have covered up
wrongdoing to protect reputations….
THE NUB OF IT
In an effort to subvert this mass-awakening to the horrors
of conventional cancer treatments, a devious attack on all genuinely
beneficial, natural (and therefore un-patentable) anti-cancer products is now
being waged by a rather worried conventional cancer establishment The
ever-so-gentle slur on our most vital of vitamins, namely Vitamin C, will soon
be extended to a wide range of essential minerals and vitamins. This is just
the beginning of the subtle, but concerted attack. The latest conventional
legislation surrounding the codifying and banning of efficacious natural
treatments is being instituted, purely because there is no money in these
natural treatments for Big Pharma. It is profit before human health, but
couched in respectable-looking, ‘sciency’ reports. And this veneer of
respectability is fooling the unsuspecting minions lower down the UPHS research
chain it seems.
NAÏVE
The two UPHS officials I spoke to regarding Dr Blair’s
Vitamin C report were extremely pleasant, open and helpful and displayed no
intention to supply misleading information. But both persons were entirely
locked into their superiors’ way of thinking. Media Relations officer Olivia
Fermano was curious as to my interest into who funded the Vitamin C report.
When I pointed out that if Dr Blair’s funding could be traced to a
pharmaceutical company producing conventional cancer treatments, then the
results would have to be very seriously questioned, Ms Fermano was genuinely
supportive. “My goodness! That is a good question. I will be right back to
you.” Her word-for-word courteous reply, some two minutes later was as
follows: “You had me genuinely
worried for a few minutes there, sir. But I am pleased to tell you that our
funding came directly from the National Institutes for Health itself. I am so
relieved.”
Ho Hum.
Similarly, Dr Garret Fitzgerald, chair of UPHS Centre for
Cancer Pharmacy Department stated: “The evidence supporting Vitamin C as a
useful adjunct in cancer treatment ranges from scant to non-existent. Linus
Pauling’s work was framed around a tenuous hypothesis only.”
Whilst the courtesy displayed by Ms Fermano and Dr
Fitzgerald is commendable, their naivety is the result of them both working in
a commercially cocooned workplace, purposefully insulated from the many success
stories attributed to non-toxic, metabolic cancer treatments, and from the
amazing health benefits accrued from consuming a lot more Vitamin C than the
FDA’s recommended daily intake of a miserable 60 mg – barely enough to keep one
out of rags and scurvy.
Long live Vitamin C and let’s have even more of it! For a
more in-depth study of the conventional cancer industry, and of the very good
news concerning alternative cancer treatments, readers are encouraged to visit www.credence.org and take the cancer tour.
Steven Ransom
and from July 2001...
Campaign for Truth in Medicine at
ALL
INFORMATION, DATA, AND MATERIAL CONTAINED, PRESENTED, OR PROVIDED HERE IS FOR
GENERAL INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED AS REFLECTING THE
KNOWLEDGE OR OPINIONS OF THE PUBLISHER, AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED OR INTENDED
AS PROVIDING MEDICAL OR LEGAL ADVICE. THE DECISION WHETHER OR NOT TO
VACCINATE IS AN IMPORTANT AND COMPLEX ISSUE AND SHOULD BE MADE BY YOU, AND YOU
ALONE, IN CONSULTATION WITH YOUR HEALTH CARE PROVIDER.